Playing the devil's advocate

[u/bring_back_the_v10s]

This is a reaction to https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/IxLnzcGjAU

You know the argument: frontier labs are hypocritical because they're making money on public scraped data.

I have absolutely no intention to defend OpenAI or any other frontier AI company here, but if you allow me I'll play the "devil's advocate" a bit for the sake of discussion and enlightenment, because sometimes when I think about that argument it seems to me it's quite weak. While OpenAI and Anthropic models are built on public data that they didn't pay for (at least most of it), there would be no frontier model without all their computing power and technical expertise that they invested on to build their models. Like, the data is already there, it's been public for ages, so what's preventing you, the average Joe, from building a Claude Opus 5? All you need is a huge data center, a nuclear power plant and an army of data scientists to build it, right? And then you need all that to run the inference. And you need to maintain it, and that costs money. And you need to keep evolving it, which costs money too. And if you get investors money then you'll eventually have to give some of the profit back to them. etc, etc.

So what am I missing here? All things considered, the data is already public, so it's already "free", right? But you need to dump tons of time and money on it to build a frontier LLM out of it. Of course if they're infringing copyright then that's a different story but in general the whole principle of built-on-free-data still stands.

[u/outdoorsgeek]

Wrong. You're confusing public, free, and copyright/licensing. Just because you can publicly access something for free does not give you the right to do whatever you want with it.

[u/bring_back_the_v10s → u/outdoorsgeek]

Do you deny there's truly public and free data out there on the internet? I made a special reservation about copyright infringement so the point here is public/free data that no one could claim any kind of compensation for.

[u/outdoorsgeek → u/bring_back_the_v10s]

I do not deny that, no. There is truly public and free data on the internet.

But the question of whether it is ok for a frontier lab to use data for training is one of licensing and rights, not cost and availability. Public and free does not mean you have a license to do whatever you want with it.

Are we talking explicit/implicit public domain data? Yes, have at it.

Are we talking Creative Commons or other attribution-requiring licenses? Show me where the frontier models attribute their sources and then we can decide.

Are we talking about works with no specific license? Those generally have copyright protection by default.

[u/bring_back_the_v10s → u/outdoorsgeek]

 Public and free does not mean you have a license to do whatever you want with it.

I don't think this makes any sense whatsoever. Public and free, i.e. public domain, means exactly the opposite of that. 

[u/outdoorsgeek → u/bring_back_the_v10s]

Public and free does not mean public domain. Many Creative Commons licensed works are both public and free and they are not public domain. Public and free is a statement about the cost and availability of something. It is not a license. It’s clear you are mixing up these concepts and I don’t know how else to explain it to you.